SWOT analysis is a long-established method of analyzing where your brand is and how you are holding up against your competitors. A social media SWOT analysis takes a close look at the social media landscape for your niche. This will help you understand what you are doing right, what can be improved, and how you can learn from the successes and mistakes of others.
Keep reading to learn more about how to do a social media SWOT analysis and the tools that make it easy.
The social media SWOT analysis uses a standard set of categories to analyze your social media performance and find ways to improve. SWOT means:
- Strengths. This is something you are already doing right. You meet or exceed your goals and at least you keep up with the competition.
- Flaws. These are areas where your brand can improve, from performance to resources to strategy.
- Possibilities. Opportunities are external factors that give your brand a chance to succeed, for example, you have successfully implemented a new platform.
- Threats. These are external factors that can hurt your social performance, such as changes in legislation or huge advertising costs from a competitor.
Strengths and weaknesses are intrinsic factors in your social media strategy. Opportunities and threats are focused on external factors.
Conducting a SWOT analysis forces you to think about the big picture. It can be tempting to focus on your own social media analytics and only focus on strengths and weaknesses. But a SWOT analysis ensures that you’re thinking about the wider landscape and changes on the horizon, so you can be sure you’re always on top of your game.
Setting annual goals
Since social networks change so quickly, it can be beneficial to conduct a social media SWOT analysis on a regular basis, such as annually or even quarterly.
With this detailed analysis at hand, you can set challenging but realistic goals and objectives. It can also help you plan ahead for new strategies, surfaces, or features that you should keep in mind when planning your annual budget.
Launching a big campaign
Before launching a new campaign, it’s important to look back at what has worked well and not so well in the past. This applies to both your own campaigns and those of your competitors.
While you don’t want to copy your competitors’ ideas, you can certainly learn from their biggest wins and losses.
Performance evaluation
In the same way that you want to assess the state of affairs before launching a big campaign, you also want to do it after the campaign has ended.
For this analysis to be a true SWOT, you need to look beyond your own metrics. Your metrics, business goals, and ROI are a good start, but remember that social media SWOT analysis also considers external factors. This means that you need to consider opportunities and threats to determine:
- If they affected the results of your current campaign
- How might they influence the results of a similar campaign in the future?
Find your strengths on social media
The data in the strengths quadrant of your SWOT analysis should focus on the metrics where you perform well, especially if you perform better than your competitors.
Start by collecting your own metrics using social media analytics tools. Then take a look at your competitors to see if you can figure out where you are superior to them.
Of course, you won’t be able to know all the metrics of your competitors, but you will certainly be able to access some of them. For example, you can view public information such as the number of subscribers and the number of users involved.
You can also use Hootsuite’s industry benchmarking and competitive analysis features to get insight into your competitors’ performance and how you’re doing.
Looking at your social voice share and measuring social sentiment are also important ways to understand and measure your success.
Identification of weaknesses
The process here is almost the same as identifying your strengths. Start with your own metrics. Compare your most recent results to previous social media campaigns or time periods. Then compare yourself to your competitors.
This will allow you to see where you are failing and identify strategies that have worked in the past but are no longer producing the expected results.
Be specific enough when you identify your weaknesses. You can’t just say you’re behind the competition on TikTok. You probably have your own strengths and weaknesses on each platform, and only by analyzing them in detail will you be able to correctly understand what to do next.
For example, maybe your Instagram feed posts are performing poorly, but your videos are performing better than expected and you have an active community interacting with your stories. Or maybe video challenges work really well for you on TikTok, but you don’t see any support for brand awareness content.
Again, you can get some of this information from your own social media analytics resources, but for a more robust analysis, a dedicated analytics tool with benchmarking capabilities is useful.
In addition to social media analytics, take a look at your organization and list any changes that could impact your social strategy. Were there layoffs? Budget cuts? Maybe you’re recovering from a social media crisis?
Monitoring social sentiment can be particularly important here, as it helps you understand the sentiment behind your brand being mentioned on social media. For example, high engagement rates for a particular post or platform may seem like a strength at first. But if your social moods are down, you may have discovered a weakness in disguise.
A crystal clear picture of your existing strengths and weaknesses will allow you to better understand and benefit from the following sections of the SWOT analysis: Opportunities and Threats.
Look for Opportunities
Remember that opportunities and threats take into account factors external to your organization. So, in order to look for opportunities, you need to make sure you have a solid understanding of what’s happening right now in both the social media world and your own industry niche.
For example, does the new Meta Verified subscription program give you a chance to stand out from the competition? Conversely, are you missing out on an opportunity if you don’t pass the test?
To stay ahead of the curve in your industry, build a social media listening program using relevant keywords and hashtags to track the competition. For example, if the volume of conversation around a certain keyword is growing, there is an opportunity to create content that is targeted towards that keyword.
You can also keep an eye out for new products, services, or marketing approaches in your niche.
On social media, follow this blog and Hootsuite’s social media channels to be the first to know about new developments that could open opportunities for your brand. It’s helpful to read our annual social media trends report, as well as our posts on future social media trends:
- Social Media Trends
- facebook trends
- TikTok Trends
- Instagram trends
You can also spot changes in the industry with Hootsuite social media experiments.
Threat detection
Like opportunities, threats are external factors. So, again, you need to understand the climate in which you work. It is especially important to understand any upcoming changes that may threaten your status quo.
For example, changes to tracking and third-party cookies that began with iOS 14 have radically changed the way marketers track and target online ads. But these changes were announced in advance. Social platforms took steps to soften the impact on advertisers, but smart marketers also set aside additional testing funds at the time to learn how to adapt to change.
And all social media managers know the pain of changing the algorithm (we’re looking at you, Instagram). It’s a constant existential threat to everyone in the industry, and while you can’t let it dominate your life, it needs to be on your radar so you can plan your turnarounds. (For example, focus on social SEO instead of hashtags.)
TikTok is currently under government scrutiny. What this will mean for marketers is not yet clear, but it certainly falls into the category of threats to anyone who gains followers and interacts with their target audience on this platform in the first place.
1. Houtsuit
Hootsuite is a particularly useful social media SWOT analysis tool as it gives you a clear view of your social performance across platforms on a single screen.
This side-by-side data comparison shows you which social tools work best for your brand so you can confidently identify your strengths and weaknesses with the level of detail you require.
The Industry Benchmarking Tool shows you how your results compare to the averages in your industry. And the competitive analysis feature compares your results to 20 specific competitors of your choice. This detailed analysis allows you to identify specific opportunities and threats as they arise.
In addition, Brandwatch-powered Hootsuite Insights is a useful tool for automating social sentiment analysis, so you’ll always have these results at hand when you’re doing your SWOT analysis.
2. Meta business suite
Source: Meta Business Suite
The native analytics tools built into Meta Business Suite give you a picture of your social media results on Facebook and Instagram.
This can help you understand which of these platforms works best for your brand right now. You can also see how your results differ on different surfaces within the platforms as you delve into the details of identifying specific strengths and weaknesses.
3. Twitter Analytics
Source: Twitter Analytics.
If Twitter makes up the majority of your social media activity, Twitter Analytics can be a useful tool.
While you will only be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter alone, you can gain useful information to help shape your competitive strategy on the platform. You will also be well equipped to identify opportunities and threats specific to Twitter.
4. TikTok Analytics
Source: TikTok
If you prefer TikTok, you can get some important insights with its own analytics platform. However, the information is only returned for 60 days, which means that this tool is less useful for quarterly or yearly SWOT analysis.
Other proprietary analytics tools
You get the idea: built-in analytics tools help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of a particular platform.
The problem is that cross-platform analysis will give you the most juicy information, and you can only do this with a third-party tool. (Unless you copy and paste all your numbers from different platforms into a spreadsheet. In that case, we have a template to help you.)
However, these native tools are a good way to start your first SWOT analysis and they are all free to use.
Social Media SWOT Analysis: Frequently Asked Questions
What is a SWOT Analysis for Social Media?
SWOT analysis for social media is a specific way to look at your performance and the overall climate in your industry and social media industry. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
How to conduct a SWOT analysis of a social media account?
In general, it is more beneficial to conduct a SWOT analysis of your overall social media marketing strategy than to study one social media profile in isolation. This allows you to better understand how to reallocate resources to maximize the social ROI.
However, you can perform a SWOT analysis for a social media account by looking at the metrics for that account and comparing them to your own past results, and then comparing your results to those of your major competitors on the same platform.
For the Opportunities and Threats analysis part, please stay tuned to the relevant social media platform to make sure you understand any changes that may impact your social marketing efforts going forward.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of social networks?
The strengths and weaknesses of social media are the social strategies you use most and least effectively. Strengths are what you do really well – compared to your previous performance and that of your competitors.
Weaknesses are areas where you are not as good as you have been in the past, or you are lagging behind your competitors. It could also be changes in your company that affect performance or that you anticipate.
An example of the strengths of a social media SWOT analysis might include:
- Videos consistently get more attention than the previous quarter
- Facebook Audience Growth Above Industry Average
- Instagram tagged products drive more sales than expected
An example of the weaknesses of a social media SWOT analysis could include: